In between the reveries this was a tentative performance by Ms. DeMent, less like stage fright than like a car engine not fully warmed on a winter morning.
But at the Armory the transformative power of stardom made their stony expressions look less like stage fright than like deadpan cool — the sang-froid of rock stars content to make you come to them.
Viewers who naïvely thought that baby stories would provide a cuddly cushion of relief in between fright fests like "Hoarders" or "Intervention" are in for a shock.
Or that Hammer Films, the home of gory, goopy, Gothic fright films like "Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell," "Dracula Has Risen From the Grave" and "The Quatermass Xperiment" (better known on American shores as "The Creeping Unknown") is back in bloodthirsty business?
The experience is an hours-long smorgasbord of both typical Halloween fright fare like zombies and ghosts, mixed with a few nods to this century's predilection for torture porn, a decent helping of fetuses in jars (and even one being kept warm by a demonic nurse), corpses convulsing in acid, and because it wouldn't be 2016 without them some fucking evil clowns.
She becomes more and more anxious: it feels to her like stage fright, unnaturally and intolerably prolonged, as though at last she were spinning all her plates at once, darting about from one to the other and terrified of making a mistake because she knows that if one plate spins off balance they will all come crashing down.
The horror genre struggled as an entire category, with lemons like "Fright Night" (DreamWorks Studios), "The Thing" (Universal) and "Priest" (Sony).
As the movie shuffles aimlessly along, Evan's baby blues widen with fright and fascination like those of Henry Thomas, as Elliott, in "E.T.: The Extraterrestrial".
In fact, because the sets look a bit shabby, the costumes a bit slapdash, and the wigs (sweet Judy Garland's ghost, the wigs!) are a fright, it seems like this remake is actually created by one of those shadow casts.
When he walks through the Theater at Madison Square Garden, people stare at him with a mix of awe (it takes guts to dress up like that) and fright (what is going on inside the head of someone sporting a spiked helmet?).
